Owner's Share (Trader's Tales from the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper) (43 page)

“Please, Ms. Maloney. That would be most helpful.”

“Any idea how you’re going to eat like that, Captain?” There was a suspicion of humor in her voice.

“Not a clue,” I admitted just as a three-ton cargo with a near-term priority popped to the top of the list. I snapped the book command, and waited while the system worked. I’d missed.

I shrugged and kept my eye on the screen but my attention on dinner. It was delicious. She’d sprinkled a bit of basil across the top of the finished dish and the salad made a deliciously chilled counterpoint to the rich, smoky flavor of the bacon laced potatoes.

In between bites, I placed a hand on the book button while I chewed. Conversation, understandably, lagged.

“Will it matter whose finger is on the button, Captain?” she asked after a few ticks.

“No, Ms. Maloney, why?”

“I can do it, if you want to finish your dinner.”

I glanced over at the teasing tone, and realized that her plate was clean while mine looked stirred about but barely eaten. I snickered, and placed my tablet between us where she could reach it easily.

“Use the arrow to select and press that button to book it. I’ll let you know which ones.”

I picked up a fork and began doing some serious damage to dinner while my eyes stayed glued to the screen. I had to keep looking down to fill the fork and on one of these instances, I looked back up to find a very high value cargo right at the top of the list—four hundred cubic meters massing eight hundred metric tons with a high priority rating. Before I could react, the screen went dark. When it came back, the cargo displayed our tag.

“Thank you, Ms. Maloney.” I turned to look at her. “I couldn’t speak fast enough.”

“I saw it come up, and had it selected, Captain. When you opened your mouth, that was the only really viable cargo up there.” She shrugged. “I hit it.”

“You did well.” I took the tablet and shut it off. “That’s about half our hold capacity and nothing close to our mass limit. It should be a fast trip.”

Chapter Thirty-Six
Diurnia Orbital:
2372-December-30

When the grav trucks arrived with the cargo, I began to appreciate why the ship had a reputation for being difficult to fill to full capacity. I had hoped to pick up half our rated mass, but with around 1200 cubic meters of cargo space, I realized it would take a cargo of gold, or perhaps uranium, to fill it. As it was, the grav trucks wheeled up with what looked like a mountain of two meter cargo cubes. The cargo wranglers began stacking them in the hold with dazzling efficiency.

The cubes had indents and dimples that let them lock together and the cargo hold was precisely tall enough to allow the handlers to stack two of the big cubes one on top of another. I had them stack the higher density load against the outside bulkheads, and the lighter density one just inside, leaving the corridor down the middle that opened into engineering.

It took the crew a bit more than a stan to wheel it in, stack it up, and lock it down. I told their crew chief how I wanted it done, and then stood back. With the ladder lowered out of the way for them, the four loaders looked more like twelve as they performed an intricate choreography.

When they left, I went through and checked the tie-downs, making sure the cubes were locked to the deck. The heavy cubes filled most of the cargo hold, leaving only five meters of open space in the forward end. The lighter cubes stacked in a single height row just in front of the heavier ones, giving me a relatively even distribution of mass down the length of the ship as well as side to side. I supposed I would get used to planning the load distributions for this hold eventually. What I’d do with single cubes or short shipments, I had no idea.

I also realized I needed to get passengers into the ship soon. While these cargoes had nice priorities, the total revenue for seven hundred metric tons wouldn’t yield much share value.

Ms. Arellone watched the process from the upper deck, and came down the ladder as soon as I put it back in place. She surveyed the load out and smiled. “Are we really rated for nine and a half metric kilotons, Skipper?”

“That we are, Ms. Arellone.”

“This is going to be a fast run, isn’t it, sar?”

“Yes, it is, Ms. Arellone. Shall we get on with it?”

She grinned, and scampered up the ladder as I sealed the lock in preparation for getting underway. I used the repaired console to log the action at 1040. We’d be able to leave any time after 1240. I kicked off a canned message to traffic control and orbital security indicating that the lock was sealed in preparation for departure at 1330.

It felt like maybe we were beginning to get a handle on things. I hated thinking that because I dreaded finding out just how wrong I probably was.

As I trudged up the ladder with that depressing thought, I realized that there must be more to the ship than showed. Looking back at the cargo cubes gleaming in the dim light, I wondered how anybody could make a profit carrying so little cargo. When I got to the landing at the top and looked down the passageway, past the passenger compartments, I wondered if passengers would help enough. We could only carry ten at most. I sighed, and headed for the cabin to work on my log book for a few ticks before I reported to the galley to fix lunch.

The log book looked a bit sparse. I really needed to do a better job than the few statements about where we were, what we were doing, and outstanding issues.

At 1100 I went to the mess deck, and tried to think of something nice to make for lunch. We’d be at navigation stations shortly after, so I didn’t want to make anything too messy. Of course, once we got pulled back and headed out, I could secure the navigation detail, and ride out to the safety limit by myself. For that matter, I could trust the helm to Ms. Arellone. Running under power wasn’t that much different from running under sail.

So many things to think about, so little time. I found myself aching for the long, untrammeled hours of being in the Deep Dark so I could get my head together. I needed to start thinking and planning, acting instead of always reacting.

I rummaged in the pantry and chillers, and came up with the fixings for sloppy joes as a change from the cold cuts and salad. Soup stock needed to wait until I could get some bones simmering, but there would be time enough once we got the sails up, and the watchstander merry-go-round started again.

Ms. Maloney and Ms. Arellone came up to the galley about 1115. They helped me scramble up the hamburger and warm some buns. While Ms. Arellone mixed in some tomatoes and spices, I checked my astrogation solutions once more. It had been a long time since I’d done astrogation from scratch, and it needed to be as perfect as I could make it. We were on a tight delivery window for some of the cargo, and I didn’t want to blow it on our first trip.

When I ran the numbers again, they looked odd.

“Ms. Arellone? Ms. Maloney? I need to re-run these astrogation numbers. I seem to have made an error. Can you finish fixing lunch while I do that?”

They shared a look and a nod. “Aye, aye, Captain,” Ms. Arellone said with a smile. She gave me a jaunty wave of her wooden spoon.

I ran up the ladder to the bridge, and pulled up the astrogation work sheets, rechecking the defaults for the ship, and then loading up our cargo. I saw the problem immediately in the detail workup. I’d slipped a decimal point in the mass of the cargo. Dealing with both mass and volume was still new to me, and I made a mental note to double-check each time. The difficulty came from working for so long in fixed container sizes. A fifteen metric kiloton can was a standard block. I knew what it massed.
Iris
had an open cargo bay. I needed to be more careful when taking loads because the available volume was finite and quite small compared to the rated power available. The cargo we had aboard, while slightly more than half filling the hold, massed something around one tenth of our capacity of nine and a half kilotons. We were running practically empty.

With the sail size and load, the astrogation calculator gave us a six-day run out to the burleson limit. The run into Welliver would be closer to seven because of the orbital’s position relation to the system’s primary. Just for fun, I checked to see how far we could go with that load, and blinked when I realized that from Diurnia we could hit any other settled system in the quadrant in just one jump.

I sat back in my seat, and contemplated what that meant. In the
Agamemnon
, the trip from Diurnia to Greenfields could take several weeks, depending on jumps and stops. Following the normal navigational paths, it might have taken upwards of half a stanyer. Jumping through the Deep Dark might make it only two months.
Iris
could make the same trip to Greenfields in just under fourteen days. I began to get a better grasp on why these ships were called fast packets.

I filed that information away for future use. In my desire to find a comfortable destination for our shakedown cruise, I’d limited my cargo choices to the systems I knew. I suspected we could do better looking for cargoes that needed to go very far in very little time. A knot in my gut began to ease.

I amended our flight plan with traffic control, and went back down to the galley to get some lunch.

Ms. Arellone smiled when I entered. “Find it, Skipper?”

“Yes, Ms. Arellone, I entered the volume instead of mass. Messed up the numbers a bit.” I walked over to the stove top, and smelled the mixture simmering there. “This smells wonderful.”

“Thanks, Skipper, but Ms. Maloney helped.” She nodded her head at the other woman.

“Thank you, Ms. Maloney!” I took another whiff, and tried to place the spicy smell. “What’d you add? Cumin?”

Ms. Maloney tilted her head in surprise. “Good nose, Captain. Yes, just a bit.”

I glanced at the chrono and went to help toast buns for lunch. We’d need to move it along if we were going to serve on time.

“You do realize that with only the four of us, we don’t really need to toast a lot in advance, don’t you, Captain?”

I looked at the bag in my hands, and the pair in the toaster, and then the stack already toasted on a platter. I sighed, and placed the bag gently back on the counter. “Um. Yes. That’s ... probably enough, isn’t it?”

She raised her eyebrows, and nodded with an amused grin on her face.

“Sorry.” I sought refuge in a mug of coffee.

Ms. Arellone rescued me by asking, “What’s our timetable looking like, Skipper?”

“Six days out to the jump limit, seven on the other end. We’ll be on Welliver Orbital on the twelfth, if all goes well.”

“Will that be in time for the cargoes, sar?”

“It will, Ms. Arellone. We should be about three days ahead on the closer one.”

I noticed Ms. Maloney looking at me with an odd expression like she was listening to something in her head, or trying to retrieve a lost memory.

“Did you say six days to jump, Captain?” she asked, finally.

“Yes, Ms. Maloney. We’re overpowered and under mass. This is going to be a quick trip.”

A smile began to break across her face. “You weren’t kidding about being two weeks from Welliver, then?”

I shook my head. “No, Ms. Maloney, and I realized that we could just as easily jump to Greenfields in the same amount of time.”

She looked at me, a startled frown on her face. “Greenfields, Captain? That’s astonishing.”

“I thought so, too, Ms. Maloney.
Iris
may not have much in the way of cargo hold, but she’s got really long legs.”

A thoughtful look lowered across Ms. Maloney’s face as she turned, took the plate of buns to the table, and grabbed a pair of tongs on the way by.

Chief Bailey ambled onto the mess deck, mug hooked in his left hand, and sniffing like a dog on a scent. “My heavens! What’s that wonderful smell? Is it food? Yes, of course! Is it lunch? Oh, yah. I’m ready for that, I am, indeed.” He made for the coffee pot, and I stepped aside to keep from getting trampled.

“We ready to get underway, Chief?”

He sipped his coffee, and sighed extravagantly. “Oh, aye, Cap. Auxiliaries on standby. Fusactors ready to power up, they are.” He nodded several times. “We’re strainin’ at the moorin’, Cap, see if we hain’t.”

Ms. Arellone caught my eye then with a nod to the chrono. “Lunch mess, Captain?”

“Absolutely, Ms. Arellone. That aroma is driving me mad. Let’s eat!”

As we settled I couldn’t help but consider all the members of my little crew. Ms. Arellone, as lead spacer, seemed to be doing very well. Ms. Maloney contributed in ways I never would have expected out of a poor, little, rich kid being put upon by parental unreasonableness. Chief Bailey was the enigma—part engineman, part bodyguard, and I wasn’t really sure what else. As much as I liked his irascible manner, I sometimes got the sense that it wasn’t all in good fun for him. I gave an inward shrug. After having Chief Gerheart taking care of my ship, anybody else would suffer by comparison. I set it aside, and gave the pile of bread, meat, and sauce on my plate my full attention.

Chapter Thirty-Seven
Diurnia System:
2373-January-2